On Forgiveness

I just finished a bowl of vegetable soup with Osem mini croutons because today is Erev Yom Kippur and it’s mitzvah to eat. But I don’t feel like eating. I feel like thinking about forgiveness, not necessarily forgiving, but thinking about it.

Yosef tells the brothers that G-d was behind all that happened between them. He tells them that they intended bad but G-d turned it into good. He says, “I’ll provide for you.” But he never says “I forgive you.” This doesn’t change the fact that Yosef is known by the title THE Tzaddik.

There’s a popular idea, that we’re obligated to ask forgiveness three times. The common understanding is that after three times of asking forgiveness of another and not getting it, it becomes the other person’s problem. But maybe at that point it just is.

Forgiveness is hard. Someone once asked Rav Eliyahu Lopian for forgiveness and surprised the seeker by saying that he needed time to work on it. After a while he told the person that he had achieved true forgiveness in his heart and could only now give that forgiveness to the man who requested it. “I forgive you,” for many is like “thank you” or “your welcome”– something that we’re taught to force ourselves to say, but something we’re not taught to achieve as a feeling. Of course it would be easier to really mean “I forgive you,” if “I’m sorry,” added up to more than seven letters and an apostrophe.

Part of what makes us us and G-d G-d is Teshuva. Men are expected to seek forgiveness from each-other and to seek to forgive each-other. But we are not G-d and the dynamic of complete Teshuva is a G-d thing that is hard for us to understand. Sometimes forgiveness between people takes many years, whether a person’s asked three times or three hundred. With great effort and ubiquitous divine providence we forgive in time. Without the attempt, even if the right lines have been recited, it doesn’t just happen (usually it just doesn’t happen).

Sometimes we speak without words, and sometimes that silence is the greatest sound. One of the things that’s said loudest without words is “I’m sorry,” matched only by an unspoken “I forgive you.” Small attempts at undoing patterns speak volumes.

Sometimes it’s good to say “I’m sorry,” and “I forgive you,” as a starter home for the palace of forgiveness that will be built on the foundation of these words. Like any kind of redemption, forgiveness comes simultaneously in the blink of an eye and as a layered, onion like process.

Someone once asked Rav Moshe Feinstein for forgiveness and Rav Moshe said that he had already granted forgiveness. He explained that as part of the bed-time Shema every night he recited the prayer of forgiveness: “Master Of The Universe, I hereby forgive anyone who angered me…or sinned against me in any way… whether against by body or my money or my honor or anything that is mine…whether accidentally or on purpose, whether through speech or action…” Saying that prayer is part of the process of forgiveness.

Sarah Shapiro’s father always said that life is an adventure in forgiveness. And as a child Sarah rolled her eyes every time he said that, just as she did when he said “no-one gets out of this world alive.” But in time she came to feel this adage’s truth deep in her bones.

Shapiro writes: “It's not just some quaint literary exaggeration -- forgive me, Daddy! -- to say life is an adventure in forgiveness, because I've learned belatedly that that's what it must become: a matter of getting to know ourselves well enough that we're no longer so shocked and baffled by our own and our fellow man's selfishness, self-centeredness, insincerity, stupidity, betrayal, pretension, hypocrisy, deception, cruelty...to become tolerant of the fact that it's God Who's holy, but Mortals R Us.”

It’s Erev Yom Kippur and I need to go and prepare in ways other than the thinking and feeling that I am experiencing as I write these words. Before I go I want to say that I hope that on this day we are all blessed to become more forgiving and more forgiven. May we (I) be blessed to remember that people are people. With all my heart I wish to accept and forgive. The only one thing I might want more is to be accepted and forgiven.

Gemar Chatimah Tovah